Psychiatrists say Trump is mentally ill

Negative responses and condemnation continue to rain down on President Donald Trump after his crude insults against “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski Thursday in two of his often acerbic tweets on Twitter.

“It is really not normal that the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief would be tweeting about somebody’s face,” says longtime Republican strategist Liz Mair. “It does not conform to the normals that we expect and we treat as pretty set in stone in this country. It is also strange.”

“Strange” is one of the milder terms that has even brought condemnation and concern from more than three dozen Republicans in Congress.

“This has to stop,” says Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. “We all have a job — three branches of government and media. We won’t have to get along, but we must show respect and humility.”

“We make a big deal that Harry Truman told off a newspaper critic for writing a bad receive of his daughter’s music concert,” says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley at Rice University. “How G-rated is that compared to what Donald Trump has done?

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, White House communications chief for George W. Bush, says “as someone who once proudly called myself a Republican, the party will be permanent associated with misogyny if leaders don’t step up and demand a retraction.”

Republicans who have raised issues about Trump in the past, and came under fire from the GOP leadership for doing so, are now saying “I told you so.”

Personally, that a pretty demoralizing feeling,” Mair told The Washington Post. “A lot of people hoped that things would be different once he got into the office, but the guy’s been on this earth for seven decades. You can’t really change his behavior after all that.”

Increasing numbers, including psychiatrists, are raising questions about Trump’s mental state and his capacity to be President.

Writes psychologist John Gartner, the founder of “Duty to Warn,” and who taught in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for 28 years:

His narcissism is evident in his “grandiose sense of self-importance … without commensurate achievements.” From viewing cable news, he knows “more about ISIS than the generals” and believes that among all human beings on the planet, “I alone can fix it.” His “repeated lying,” “disregard for and violation of the rights of others” (Trump University fraud and multiple sexual assault allegations) and “lack of remorse” meet the clinical criteria for anti-social personality. His bizarre conspiracy theories, false sense of victimization, and demonization of the press, minorities and anyone who opposes him are textbook paranoia. Like most sadists, Trump has been a bully since childhood, and his thousands of vicious tweets make him perhaps the most prolific cyber bully in history.

In a conference of psychiatrists at Yale University earlier this year, Gartner warned that Trump suffers “a dangerous mental illness” and is not fit to lead the United States.

“We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump’s dangerous mental illness,” he told the conference.

Dr. Brandy Lee, assistant clinical professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, said “some prominent psychiatrists have noted Trump’s mental health is the elephant in the room. I think the public is really starting to catch on and widely talk about this now.”

“I’ve worked with some of the most dangerous people our society produces, directing mental health programs in prisons,” says James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and professor at New York University.

How dangerous is Trump? Gilligan adds:

I’ve worked with murderers and rapists. I can recognise dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous this man is.

“I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange,” says Brzezinski. “It does worry me about the country.”

Adds her co-host, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, who is also engaged to Brzezinski: “We had so many people saying, ‘Hey, hope you’re okay’. . . We’re okay. The country is not.”

President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”

Trump called Scarborough “Psycho Joe” in his tweets. In the article Friday, he said the White House threatened a negative tabloid story from the National Enquirer until they made nice with Trump and asked him to get the paper’s publisher and friend, David Packer to kill the story.

Reported J. Freedom du Lac and Jenna Johnson:

“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” they wrote. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”

“That’s blackmail,” said “Morning Joe” team member Donnie Deutsch.

They also reported:

In their op-ed, the MSNBC hosts fact-checked the president’s Thursday tweets, writing that they contained “a flurry of falsehoods.”

Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.

The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.

“It was amazing how many lies he packed into two tweets,” Brzezinski said Friday.

Of Trump’s claim that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift,” she and Scarborough wrote in their op-ed: “That is also a lie.”

Bottom line?

Donald Trump is a crazy egomaniac. Even worse, he has the authority to order dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone or anything that displeases his warped mind,

49 COMMENTS

We’ve never had to face a mentally-ill incoming president before because we just assumed that the primary process and career politician things would screen them out.

Obviously, we were wrong and we should correct that by requiring presidential candidates to pass a non-partisan mental and physical exam, with results publicly disclosed. And 10 years of tax returns/financial records. They need to be disclosed, too. And POTUS needs to be divested of all business interests. No exceptions.

The chief executive for the country lacks self-control, we need someone who expresses diplomacy, which is particularly needed at this time in history. The president looks more like a loose cannon. Particularly disconcerting considering the responsibility he holds.

If mister Drumph is not nuts than can you name atleast one other 71yo man who bleaches their hair blonde[think the chemicals have affected his brain] & does a comb over.Their is something to the saying that dizzy blonde.

I was an early supporter of Obama. Ten years ago I was an assistant minister at a (other than me) all black church. I was the one that told them Obama was running. Most of my friends were black (and still are). We now have the worst race relations since the early 1960’s. And I am sick of being called a racist and a liar by white liberals everytime I disagree with them.

His mental instability was obvious from the very start, why this is just now being brought to the forefront of discussion is a mystery. It is still not to late to stop his madness, it will just take some guts on the part of our government officials to do the correct thing. We as the public also have our own role to play as well, allowing a person who has obvious and somewhat sever mental issues to remain in this position can only lead us down the road to certain disaster, it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when this occurs. Regardless of one’s political lean, this has got to stop, for the sake of all of us.

Even credentialed “Yale”, “New York University”, “Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine” psychiatrist aren’t given enough credit to sway the Trump supporters to take note, UGH!! Sob!! I beg Trump supporters to quit being mad at politics and educate yourself about details of why politics is so complicated. I believe both Bush and Obama were patriots but had different ideas on what is best for America. Neither were disrespectful to anyone that I can recall. Mr. Trump is OBVIOUSLY about Mr. Trump. You can not demand respect, you can only earn respect by respecting.

To the anti-Bill Clinton respondent: There was no “sexual addiction” by our budget-balancing Bill Clinton; he engaged in a brief extramarital lapse with an adult female that involved fellatio (considered to be “foreplay” in many parts of the Midwest (including Arkansas). Accuser Juanita Hickey (turned Broaddrick when she married her extramarital lover) was deemed by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr to “have no credibility”!

The issue is the mental instability of the cheat-to-“win” Russia-colluding dangerously volatile narcissistic incompetent, corrupt to the very core Donald Trump occupying our White House and disrespecting the Office of the President! Check out two law-breaking Trump items: a three-way (three servers) hook-up originating from Trump Tower between the Kushner office, the DeVos-owned Spector Health in Michigan, and the Russian ALFA BANK that author and analyst Tea Pain (Theodore Addison Pain) was able to track: “Jared Kushner’s Stealth Russian Data Machine” (posted on WordPress.com blog site)—a “database replication” that was done in small, undetectable increments throughout the 2016 campaign year. Also read “The Making of Donald Trump” by recognized Trump expert David Cay Johnston, and pay close attention to the long-term partnership between Trump and Felix Sater (offices two floors below Trump’s in Trump Tower even after becoming a twice-convicted felon)—the Russian-born son of the Russian MAFIA crime boss! The mentally ill mobbed-up Trump poses a very clear and present danger to this already great nation! He needs to go.

I posted on Facebook and elsewhere on the day this maniac got ‘elected’ that he is mentally unstable: with sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. Six months later people are beginning to realise it. Wake up America and get ride of him before he does any further damage. I cannot believe the ignorance of the people who continue to support him. Why?? I don’t care if you are Republican or Democrat (or neither) – this goes beyond ideological boundaries.

Trump frequently develops derogative titles for those who oppose him in some way. Maybe it is time for him to experience similar negative attacks. People could start referring to him as the Demented Donald or Man-boy Trump or possibly the Peed on President, How about the Nabob Nut? Can anyone think of other appropriate derogatory terms for him. He certainly supplies plenty of material to do so.

Tom, I’ve been screaming how sick he is since 35 psychiatrists wrote a letter to the NY times saying just that (and I think hundreds more agree). I think the perfect name for him is “Scared Little Boy”.

Well…………DUH! He’s shown that he is CRAZY from the very start of the campaign, yet this is the issue where you decide to call him on his behavior?! I keep waking up to his lunacy on a daily basis – the aberrant behavior that would have disqualified him in ever participating in the election if we did “due diligence” and required that anyone running for any office have a mental exam.

i do not believe any of you are as sane or more sane than trump. nor is it appropriate for any psychiatrist, to misuse the media for their soap box. the diversity of realities today, is a sad commentary about this whole insane world today.

No one has perfect mental health but there *are* qualitative differences between people’s ability to function in a non-disturbed way, DT is not simply “different” or an example of psycho-behavioral diversity.

How do you know all the psychiatrists are liberal? Are you privy to some esoteric information the rest of us do not have? I think you’re full of it and are just spouting off because you’re a partisan republican. Stinks to be you, oh narrow minded one.

I have a friend who is a licensed psychiatrist. He told me that a full 1/3 of the population in America suffers from mental illness in one form or another. All you have to do is drive the freeways during rush hour to find out. Its too bad people see mental illness with a stigma. It only prevents people like Trump who obviously needs help from getting it.

Trump seems to overcompensate for attractive women, leaving me to believe he has underlying homosexual tendencies, he admiration for Putin and Flynn are good examples. The degradation of women and childish attacks on their face shows me, deep down, he hates women, no matter how attractive and has to constantly convince himself he is straight. He will never respect women, because he prefers men.

There are literally dozens of different reasons why a man might display misogynistic behavior, assuming it’s always some kind of latent homosexuality is an ignorant and overused accusation/insinuation which needs to be ended.

At the same time overidealizing professional practices which exist in part for reasons of legality and practicality is not the end-all be-all; patterns of behavior when displayed publicly, consistently and chronically *can* form part of a psychiatric profile (in fact there are arguably limitations to relying on what someone says about themselves and how they act for 30-45 minutes once a week while in a session since many people are masterful at presenting themselves in certain deliberate ways).

So the talking heads aren’t used to getting back the trash they dish out? President Trump isn’t crazy, he just gives back more than he receives and the snowflakes aren’t used to that sort of stuff from people they attack. Love it!

It’s not just the talking heads (I don’t care personally for 99% of the media in this country) but DT’s behavior is consistently vulgar, petty, overpersonalized and vindictive (the very fact that as POTUS he focuses on personal disputes on Twitter rather than learning the details of the massive healthcare reform he’s championing reveals deficits about his judgment, I don’t see how you can say otherwise).

He’s not so much mentally ill as he’s never had to ever give a shit how he presents himself to others. At 71 years old he’s not going to change or tone it down per his handlers, and they actually encourage this behavior because his base eats it up.
“In your guts, You know He’s Nuts” should be the new slogan for Trump. Hell- it worked for Goldwater back in 1964!!!

Your argument seems based on a strange premise–the idea that someone who’s never had to present themselves to others can’t be mentally ill? If anything that would lead to a greater likelihood of a mental disorder in my opinion (although more in the realm of a personality disorder than something like bipolar or schizophrenia).

Anecdotally, a chap was in a missile silo with those vaunted ‘two keys’, and noticed that both key switches were just ordinary electrical contacts in ordinary rack-mount chassis panels, held in with ordinary cross-head screws. One enterprising missileer with a screwdriver, a bit of wire, and a couple clip leads could have easily defeated that “two-person” requirement. Yeah. We’re not so sure. J.

If I am not mistaken (full disclosure: I often am) the keys must be turned simultaneously. If one is turned before the other, or tricked into ‘thinking’ it has been turned before the other – no big bada-boom. The missile will not launch. The missileer would have to run wire from one switch to the other, so that he (or she?) could be in proximity to it, then turn his key and ‘fake’ the other switch within milliseconds of each other. Not saying that it coudn’t be done. Just that it would be trickier than just turning one switch, then the other.

I was stationed at Malmstrom AFB, a SAC Base with Minuteman ICBM. It is impossible for one person to turn both “keys” at the same second. The keys are do not look like an average keys and theh distance between then two make it impossible to “rig”. There are extreme safety measures in place and in fact The President can not order a launch by himself for obvious reasons.

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